invelica

hey everyone! have you played Harvest Moon? that's great! I haven't, though I do remember my younger cousin maxing out the timer on one of the GBA/DS ones and I did spend about 10000 years in the mines in Stardew Valley (enough to make a fangame about it)

even if you haven't played Harvest Moon, you probably know the General Vibe of the whole thing where the original developers of Harvest Moon lost the rights to the name to Natsume, the English publisher/localizer, who went on to churn out a bunch of not very good games under the Harvest Moon name

anyway does anyone want to hear about how I'm convinced, to some degree, that Sports Story is the Natsume Harvest Moon of Golf Story

me neither tbh, because that would require me replaying Golf Story enough to exactly detail the differences between the game, and I am a lazy canon. but as Sports Story proves, playing Golf Story is a great thing to do! Sports Story proves this by being a video game which is a trainwreck in twelve different ways

I wrote these 6,000 words over 23 sections to exorcise every last thought from my head. It is the only way I know how.

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Section 1: Categories - 2022 disasters in Australia

I finished playing Sports Story over 3 days (probably about 20 hours total) and to say the least, it was an experience, but rather than being a experience in enjoying a good video game like a normal person, it was a experience in finding out all the different ways in which this game went wrong and trying to understand the reasons why it went wrong.

this is the unedited article about a disaster, and you, poor reader, are now the person Wikipedia diving at 3 AM.

the things Sports Story does are so... fascinating in a kind of terrible way. and I'm willing to play and write too much about a nightmare.

Section 2: Story of Sports

Sports Story, on paper, is a sequel to the 2017 indie darling Golf Story developed by Sidebar Games, a two-ish person Australian company.

Golf Story is a sports RPG that borrows heavily from the pedigree of the portable Mario Golfs, being a lighthearted and exciting adventure in a well-crafted golf world, and recieved lots of acclaim as an indie success.

Riding this momentum, Sports Story was first announced in 2019 as a sequel featuring many more sports in the same world; though PR for it was steady at first, it slowly trailed off through a 2020 delay announcement, eventually resulting in near-silence until mid-2022, when the December 2022 release window was announced.

stealthdropping as the crown jewel of Nintendo's indie advent calendar on December 23rd, it's clear that Sports Story was rushed to make its timeslot, in the sense that it is full of graphical and progress-blocking glitches - but the more time passes, the more you go from "this game just needs a little bugfixing" to a "a patch will not fix this game".

there are entire plotlines shoved aside, entire bits of content rearranged or bloated beyond belief, thrown to the side and dragged back in. the golf gameplay has inexplicably gotten worse than the original, like they don't share any blood. the other sports are anemic, entire plotlines reduced to identical fetch quests which don't offer any narrative or mechanical guidance. meanspirited words are put in your character's mouth more and more, and the entire script is riddled with typos and inconsistencies that don't seem fitting of a native English team (though everyone sure does say "Oi" a lot).

the more I examined it, the more I felt like, the original devs made half of a game, and a game that has good stuff in it, but then scope creep grew and grew until it was too late, the deadlines loomed too close after too many delays on a contract, and either they or another team had to rush in and restore the Jesus fresco.

I don't have the analysis to figure out everything that went wrong - even as the gamedev in me screams "did you REALLY make the quest flag a single int" - but I do have the words to say, in completely undirected fashion, everything that was just profoundly weird and un-golf-story-y about this game.

Section 3: The Critically Acclaimed Golf RPG

sports story is like 90% fetch quests and trade quests by volume, which starts out kind of cute and fun when you're on a relatively small map and the logic is somewhat sound, but eventually you end up just being told "find me water balloons" and the quest journal says "find water balloons" and when you talk to Ms. I Need Water Balloons again she just said "got water balloons?" and you really have no idea where to find water balloons other than by intuiting that the 10 Trade Markers around the tennis academy will result in a chain that eventually ends up in water balloons but you just don't know where to start the chain

(you start the chain by finding an un-hinted item in a unmentioned treasure chest in a hidden spot in the woods that you have to walk around a bunch of trees to find)

by the way the water balloons are still in my inventory at endgame despite me giving her the water balloons, I guess

Section 4: I Have Never Played a Sierra Game

in general the game is kind of unnavigatable in that old adventure game / rpg way where you need to find a special kind of tea for someone, but you have no idea where to get the tea, and the answer is if you go to the scientist's lab at the far corner of the cave where there was a switch he wouldn't let you touch earlier, now you can touch the switch to operate his doomsday device which will, after a bunch of scary noises, dispense tea

(the actual scene where you operate his machine is pretty cute)

and you think, oh this could have been solved by having a quest marker pointing where to go, or a map you could look at which lists notable locations, or a more detailed quest log, or having any NPCs say something about that scientist's laboratory, or a million different subtle and unsubtle hints that are just too much for sports story,

except for when you're doing a cricket minigame and being explicitly told that X is block, Y is paddle, A is bunt, and B is crumpets (I don't remember cricket terminology), and if that's too confusing, you are told immediately after that you should press the button on your controller that matches the direction of the pitch, and it is like, okay sports story, do you hate telling me things or do you like telling me things

Section 5: What's In a Logo

there are six sports located in sports story's logo:

• golf: present
• tennis: present, regrettably
• baseball: absent
• cricket: narratively present, mechanically you do like three sidequests where you protect or try to destroy a trash can. that's a sticky wicket for england
• volleyball: once at the start of the game and I objectively hated it. additionally, your characters' sprite becomes comically low-res when you bump in volleyball
• soccer: appears in two sidequests but you only do PKs

one of the most fleshed-out sports in the game - fishing - does not appear in the logo

Section 6: Please Rebrand

sports story probably could have been better built as golf story 2, because the game relies really heavily on golf, but also the golf is worse than golf story 1, and all the other sports in it are half-baked or just reduced to golf. it could have also been built as fishing story, because honestly there is no shame about doing 'golf story but it's another sport'.

it also could be tennis story, which in a sense, it sort of was, because the tennis part of the game grew so big that it was blamed as one reason for the delay, and it effectively expanded into its whole independent subsection of the game, but also the tennis substory is really weird and I don't really remember why you end up enrolling at a tennis school for kids as a 28 year old other than "you walked in there and asked the headmaster 'what's up'" anyway the tennis part is not good

Section 7: I Didn't Even Talk About Detention

come to think of it, you start off in tennis by getting a scholarship to Tennis School from a washed-up player's tennis lessons. he fends off about a million questions about his former teammate, Mr. Rockstar Tennisman, before handing you a check to tennisland and telling you "don't forget why you started down this path - revenge"

and then you go to tennis school, all the kids there are STILL asking about mr rockstar tennisman and you are like "man this guy must really be someone, I can't wait to meet him and he turns out to be a huge heel-turn asshole selling us out or something" and then you just uh never meet him (as per the keen eyes of Frosh though it appears that his sprite appears on the podium in the final cutscene so uh, that's cool I guess)

instead in tennis school you go on a long elaborate quest to unravel the seven mysteries of the school (actually just one mystery) by finding the Old Academy locked away behind the current school. the old academy turns out to be a one-room building where you fight against a ghost (invisible sprite) in a tennis match, at which point you leave and agree to never talk about it again

the next day you are told it's time for your great promotion to the second floor of the tennis academy, and immediately after getting promoted you are told "ok you're done here, go be free and explore the world"

tennis is over now.

Section infinity: Plot Summary

alright it's plot summary time so buckle up. the general plot of this game, if I had to summarize it from memory, is:

after a opening cutscene establishing Purestrike Corporation as the EvilMcHuge Company that is trying to buy up small businesses (golf courses) and destroy their history to turn them into capitalism machines, you and the cast from Golf Story are introduced as a bunch of people on this cool island on a vacation not at all ominously sponsored by Purestrike

you go around the beach and accomplish some light getting-used-to-the-game-mechanics tasks before checking into the hotel and being introduced to the game's isometric overworld, including a hub mall that slowly updates over the course of the game.

you go off to the first golf course to get some practice in, before being wrapped up in a huge mystery that involves catching bees, talking to witches, becoming a lumberjack, and showing the yakuza who means business. eventually this fun diversion, which is narratively entertaining (look at that last sentence) but mechanically extremely fetch-questy, ties back into the main story by revealing that the owners of this golf course sold out to Purestrike, and the yakuza came to collect on their dues. foreshadowing ensues and also after literally like 4 hours of questing you get to play your first golf of the game

(the golf is just okay)

afterward, the tennis academy opens up, as well as Britannia. britannia is a silver mine where a bunch of cricket players are trapped before their big game against france. the key players here are a shirtless dude who speaks in kind of like, eastern european broken english, and his wife and daughter, who is the manager down here or whatever. she's got a very poor grip on everyone down here and you help her out by pulling the mine workers (who are having a scientists vs laborers war down here for some reason) and cricket team together before the Big Game which by the way is for like ownership of the mine or something? I don't recall. there is a weird section where you must resist the Dark Whispers (cheap screen-warping filters) and cricket-bat some bombs into rocks in order to rescue the cricket captain and escape from a murderous convict

it turns out that the murderous convict is a good bloke who is just following his beliefs and, when the chips are down, it is revealed to you, the viewer, that the daughter running the mine racket envies his freedom and ability to be himself, compared to how her parents are really meddling in her work, leaving her yearning for the ability to rack up a win on her own merits

anyway her parents turn out to have sold the mine (and golf course, natch) to Purestrike for "the good of everyone", which leaves the daughter feeling understandably hurt and betrayed, and the cricket match meaningless. luckily the captain steps up and reunites everyone and wins the big match when the Queen arrives and intervenes in your favor (remember the queen, she'll be important later)

afterward you are shipped out to the Fishing Land in order to investigate the Dark Whispers. in the fishing land everyone introduces themselves as "Firstname Lastname. Pleasure." and I'm not sure why but the bit is kinda funny. the shot from the title screen appears in Fishing Land and I'm not sure why because it's not like a big story moment or anything it just looks kinda nice. actually going fishing in Fishing Land kind of rules mechanically, proving that fishing is goated when sports are the vibe.

in Fishing Land the character arc of the week is how it has been raining for six months straight, making fishing just be a total drag to get up at 4 AM for, and everyone blames the outcast family on the edge of town for not offering one of their own to placate the gods. you acquaint yourself with the family, and learn that ther offering is actually just a bunch of fish, but it is so dangerous that whoever makes the offering never comes back.

being the goodhearted person you are, you go with the youngest of their brood to make the offering together, and are immediately dragged into literally The Water Temple. it's a pretty entertaining mixup and honestly the dungeoning bits are fine. it's very zelda. you get a new powerup ability for this dungeon, it's used to fight the boss, there are some trivial puzzles along the way, all very nice. you get to throw a giant squid with a little super mario 64 "so long, gay bowser" spin throw.

anyway everything is probably better now in fishing town, I didn't check if it stopped raining or anything because I immediately got shuffled off to The Purestrike Cup, a prestigous golf tournament that involves all the major factions in the game (the queen, the yakuza, purestrike, fishermen). the techbro parody Purestrike COO or whatever who is constantly saying shit like "brand synergy" and "let's circle back re: the deliverables" tries to force a sketchy contract to play for Purestrike on you and your obstinate rival Lara and - I have to emphasize - you accept wholeheartedly (?????)

like there is every red flag in the game about Purestrike, and it's explicitly called out that Lara, your rival, will be forced to play tennis, a sport she hates, and the MC gets words put in their mouth saying to not worry about it, this is their big chance, etc. after the gig is up they do an entire fucking inspirational speech about how even if the contract is bad and Purestrike owns your souls, they can't own the accomplishments you make with your own hands and like. yes! yes they can! you shouldn't have to sell yourself out to an obviously sketchy corporation in order to succeed, especially not in fiction where the narrative is obviously trending against this.

anyway this actually never backfires on you so uhhh don't worry about it

so you win the Purestrike cup with the help of Lara and Lara's girlfriend** Moon, and it turns out right after that Moon's father gets kidnapped by the yakuza because actually I don't remember the reason I thought it was just gonna be that he was having a fight with Moon because he was a helicopter parent but more on that below

you do the most reasonable thing, which is have the three of you execute a raid on the yakuza army base (don't worry about it). this is actually a good part in the game, despite containing no sports, because it's tightly executed, funny, and fast-paced.

there's not much narrative here, but after breaking out of the yakuza base, you find yourself in... purestrike hq. gasp!! as was foreshadowed, Purestrike and the yakuza have been working together all along to buy up the entire island, and thus gain control of sports and distort it into a capitalistic, perverted version of itself! (college football organizations, do not interact)

and there's only one thing to do in this case: tell the queen

so anyway you go off to queensland (not literally queensland, despite the developers being australian) and do some fetch quests because the dude running the castle in the queen's absence is a smug asshole named Bob Greatest Hits (actually Robert the Best but I localized for the American audience).

the queen shows up and immediately dumps you into a trap hole under her throne, which first looks like a double-cross but is actually a "shhh I'm on your side moment", as she implores you to find The Truth out in the deadly wild west badlands (actually they're sorta north and to the east), under the cover of "being exiled to the badlands".

the badlands kind of suck because they are this weird libertarian zone where it's constantly impressed on you that there are no rules here and everyone is fighting for themselves, which is reinforced by how many people tell you to go blow up other people's stuff with no remorse. and you'd think the story arc here is "people should learn to get along and fight for the greater good" but actually it's just "hold on blow up the dude who's amassed all the oil. ok that's my oil now. let's skedaddle"

and then you find The Truth at the end of the desert and it's some dude who's like "there is a mysterious sporting event you have never heard about, that is played once every decade which determines who owns All Sports on the island. go forth and win" because this game had a release date of December 23rd and it probably should have been like sometime in 2023 but contractual obligations who knows. as the MC says, i'm tired

anyway you inform the queen of your Truth and she gives you the ol' pre-final-boss party with all-the-past-arc-characters, which is always welcome tbqh, before shipping you off to Endgame Zone where you kinda uh (checks) play golf 10 times but lightly themed after (checks) a bunch of other sports plus just like some balloons and weird spectral animals and tada you're the king of sports!

in your victory speech, the staff says "as per the queen's wishes, all innovation in sports will be stifled for 10 years and rules will remain the same", and you respond, explicitly, "I hope things can stop changing and just remain the way they've always been".

wasn't that what you were fighting for????? not the freedom of the individual against the corporation? jesus fucking christ I can't believe they just never went back to purestrike right after saying "this one goes all the way to the top"

you know it's a good ending because lara says "what did we accomplish then" and the queen is like "look we'll get around to blowing up purestrike just not right now it's hard". roll credits, drop another sequel hook in the post-credits with some randos staring at you look I am imploring you PLEASE if you have rush your story to a conclusion don't do it like.... like any of this like just don't

Section 9: The Top Ten List

splitting the story into arcs, it's kinda interesting to arrange them from "this arc was definitely done early in the game's development" to "this was rushed together to make the game technically complete", since it's really clear that some arcs have more polish, more writing charm, and more... I don't hate it... than others

• introductory beach: excellent introduction to the game that introduces a bunch of mechanics that are often just not followed through on later. definitely part of the "we demoed this game to somebody" slice

• the mall: the mall is solid overall, it evolves nicely throughout the game and there are some recurring charcters you get invested in. there are lots of completely optional things here (like the vhs store) that are quite fun

• witch / lumberjack / yakuza land: too big for its own good, the game still holds up (as the first chapter of the game) with fun stories that are sometimes hard to figure out due to the size and lack of direction in quests. the framerate is extremely bad when bees are involved. wraps up nicely with a good hook into the "main plot" of the game (until it isn't)

• fishing arc + water temple: a little fetch-quest heavy but mechanics were good and the writing was solid. dungeon puzzles were weak but I'd rather have a game be trivial instead of obtuse

• secret base: comedy is perfectly on-point here with some good action sequences and decent stealth content. not much payoff at the end but I don't blame this arc

• britannia: I got stuck here for an hour so I'm biased against it, plus all the "science vs labor" and weirdly stereotypical french people kind of just had bad vibes. I don't like the queen and cricket was dumb. I really like the main character here. that's it

• queensland: I don't like the queen. there's some optional items to the left in a maze that I don't know what they're for still

• badlands: they sure were

• endgame: look we both know this is here just because the devs had to rush the game home but I really think that you should NOT have used assets that were clearly from a spooky ghost region that was cut, because now I know there was a spooky ghost region that was cut

Section 10: The Bug Reel

the game is profoundly, extremely buggy, both in obvious and hard-to-discover ways

the camera cuts are weirdly choppy in a way that doesn't feel final, dialogue boxes often point to the wrong place, the script is littered with weird typos (EDITOR NOTE: I do not know if Australians really call renting videos "hiring a video" or if that was a weird find-and-replace), and it is comically easy to get your game into an unwinnable state by talking to the same event trigger twice or talking to a few event triggers that don't despawn

there are like three gamebreakers in 15 minutes in tennis academy becuase it looks like talking to event triggers just advances some sort of global event flag by 1, as talking to the same event trigger repeatedly will cycle your quest journal through all the objectives in the game (but without spawning corresponding triggers on the map, locking you out), which is just a top-to-bottom confusing code implementation

an additional hot tennis tip is that balls are always live, so if you need to hit a target or something and you miss you can just run around the net and hit the ball again rather than wait for the next ball

minigame challenges in the game are also comically inconsistent in that sort of mid-2000s game sort of way, where some will terminate when you succeed, others won't, there's no way to cancel out of a minigame that is no longer winnable, par for the course kinda stuff. the difficulty level of these ranges wildly and you will often be forced to do a really impossible challenge right before a trivial one

you know that thing when movies cut between two characters and the perspective is all wrong? that but for moving between two rooms

there's a really funny way to avoid security guards

you can walk around this door, no one is surprised

Section 11: Lara de Lune

ok I gotta explain the two asterisks on Moon now

so Moon is this cute golf prodigy you meet in the first chapter who is doing like incredibly cool trickshots under the watchful eye of her dad and stuff

she's kind of established as like, "energetic golf genius who is sheltered because her parents are the helicopter type forcing her to only practice her craft instead of making friends like a normal person", and mostly disappears until later in the game, when lara calls upon her to be the third person in your golf team for the big tourney (why does the tourney matter again? I don't remember)

lara, moon, and technically you [share a bonding moment] at the mall where lara buys her some stuff and she has big "no one has ever been nice to me as a person before" / "I've never gotten to do something of my own free will" energy and anyway it is very cute and good and she deserves good things and that's why you all go on a fun spy mission together and then basically she goes away for the rest of the plot

Section 12: Punch Drunk

you can rank up your ID Card all the way to Rank SS. there is exactly 1 location (the very end of the game) that requires S rank, and 0 locations that require SS rank. I have not found any other benefit your rank confers upon you, aside from early ranks gating entry to stores

ranking up your ID Card usually involves both doing the main plot and completing some of the side challenges, but by the three-quarters mark of the game, going to the mall will award you nearly an entire stamp card's worth of free stamps every chapter because whoever was in charge of balance wanted to make sure you got your rank to S

you can be rank SS before accomplishing this anyhow so like thanks I guess

Section 13: OK I'm tired of headers

if you look at the delay announcement in 2020 you can actually see what plans for the game were in motion at that time and compare it to the final cut:

• giant squid: Yes
• galf pinball: Not as far as I know
• hotel b1f: No, and additionally, 30 minutes into the game, a chess club is advertised on 3F of the hotel, requiring a B license. I never figured out if I could get there
• cricket captain: Yes
• soccer with a dog: No soccer but you can pet like two dogs in the game
• vampire hotel: What? That sounds cool. No
• sell yourself out to bigcorp: Yes
• exiled by the queen: Yes

by the way I never wrote this anywhere but this game just leaves me wondering if australians like the queen. is the queen that cool that she gets to be pivotal to this game? idk I just assumed that everyone outside of britain didn't like the queen because britain's done a lot of things but that's a little out of scope for a review of a sports game

Section 14

oh yeah if you were wondering what the gym in the mall is for, if you find a membership card in an out-of-the-way door in Britannia (it's actually very in the way at one specific moment, but the story clumsily blocks you from approaching the door until Britannia is saved) you can pay like a bunch of cash one time (three times, technically) to get free experience and stat boosts

by the way you can view your stats by pressing A on your ID card or something? there are three stats, Power, Control, and Strike. they are never really explained at all ever and they will increment at completely arbitrary points on your EXP meter which do not seem exactly correlated to "when you gain a level" (levels don't matter). power definitely does increase your drive because I was driving like 280y at the end of the game but no one tells you anything

golf story HAD stats and levels and they were normal and made sense

Section 15

I think the mall logo on the map transition screen is upside-down (also I do not really like the vectorized-style of the map transitions, it clashes with the rest of the game)

Section 16

speaking of driving I'm personally annoyed with how bouncy the ball is in golf, because you can aim with your shot target at the very first inch of grass beyond a water hazard and still roll your ball right past the green. it feels nigh undoable sometimes

oh yeah did I mention the power up balls? the first area in the game actually gives you a good "free trial" of a powerup ball - and a very innovative one also (correcting your ball's bounce towards the hole) - but after that powerups are never mentioned again. you keep getting a handful (though not a lot) from various treasure chests on the map, but you can't actually gain a renewable source of powerups until you are basically in endgame, where the balls are $5.00 a pop

I mean I don't really think money is renewable anyway so you probably don't want to spend all of it because there are lots of points in the game where you seemingly need to have as much as $50 on hand to proceed and I don't know what happens if you, say, bought too much food from various vending machines in the game, such as the $1 ice or the $5 water or the $12 "junk" from the first two chapters

(the ice is "limit 1" but you can buy it infinitely)

the food, as far as I know, serves no discernable purpose

Section 17

by the way I hope you are opening all those treasure chests (as well as searchable objects that effectively function as treasure chests, such as buoys), because even though 99% of them will just have golf consumables or cash, there are at least 3 instances in the game of treasure chests that contain unique story items that are necessary in order to proceed and you WILL not have any clue that this is the case and it will take you like 30 minutes to realize you missed a treasure chest because buoys don't have an "open" sprite and it WILL piss you off

Section 18

interviews for the game indicated an intention for the game to be a bit more self-directed and sorta open-worldly, letting you choose where and what to progress

in practice this is executed as "there's a main plot which progresses linearly, and a bunch of side plots which you can do for items and currency, and there's also the Tennis Academy, which is standalone but confers an item that is required at the very end of the game with only one line of explanation"

Section 19

"people have said they'd like a minimap in golf, so we're trying to get that in"

it isn't in, I never figured out if you could move the camera around in a way that isn't centered around the shot target, the game never tells mentions for a second that you use the right stick to control ballspin, and also the pre-hole flyovers are just like really disorientating and hard to remember.

the second golf course in the game (in britannia) takes place in a cave where a lot of visible overhangs don't actually block the path, but a lot of rocks that seem unassuming do.

Section 20

I am still uncertain if you are required to hit any particular performance targets to advance through the game.

when playing on the queen's golf course, you explicitly need 3 birdie medals, but every other golf competition does not offer you a leaderboard or a score target, and I managed to clear Britannia with an awful +5.

the final competition in the game, which is just 10 different hit-the-target golf shots, gives you an arbitrary double-digit score for each event that is proportional to how many times you hit the target, but is never explained or evaluated

Section 21

all tennis games are only 1 game long (with one exception IIRC, where it's best-to-3. no, it's not the final tennis match, it's somewhere in the middle), you are always on serve, and for any side quest where you are required to return a ball shot at you, it is launched from off-screen. I suppose there are no animations for other people throwing balls or machines launching balls

come to think of it, when you ride a train later in the game, the wheels on the train don't turn. it's very obvious

there is a pretty sweet 'key jangling' animation when you get a key in the water temple though

also, when you lose a point in tennis and your character makes a sad animation, I'm pretty confident they're holding a golf club while doing so.

Section 22

honestly all of this is quite ironic, given the late November 2022 release of the completely unrelated game Soccer Story, which I trialed on Xbox Game Pass.

Soccer Story follows in the footsteps of the developers' other big game Legally Distinct Papers Please in the UK by being the "we have Golf Story at home" of video games, inspiring tons of Reddit comments asking "is this the Golf Story sequel" and nearly wholesale copying the menu UI of golf story

gameplay-wise, Soccer Story was clunky. reviews pan its poor Actual Soccer gameplay, but I also found myself frustrated with the cringey writing (in the great indie vein of 'fit as many one-liners as possible, even if it doesn't fit the world') and general friction when trying to navigate the overworld.

I wouldn't say it's a bad game, but it's just kind of the sort of vibe I didn't gel with, because it felt like an RPG that didn't reallllly want to have an identity of its own, and it didn't stick with me

and now here we are with Sports Story, which has flashes of its old self, but often times is completely off its rocker, unpolished and often entirely baffling, lacking the spark of the original, and it is like, who is the real successor to the throne now?

no one! you get nothing! you lose! good day, sir!

my review of golf story is named "play golf story". what a coincidence, my review of sports story is also named "play golf story".

Conclusion

why are all the item descriptions so weird? they're not weird in a "this was dev text not meant to be launched" way, they're weird in a way that doesn't reflect the humor of the game and often feel like they are written in a language that is not English. many of the descriptions are not informative at all. items stick around in your inventory after being used for quests. I don't get it.

like I have this really weird conspiracy theory that this game got ripped out of the original devs' hands after they completed like half of it, and handed to a studio that only sort of gets how to make games and how to write games in English and that's why part of the game feels polished and part just feels like, wrong, but not in a soulless way, just in a "I don't get it" sort of way where you are doing a bunch of fetch quests which serve no narrative purpose that are never explained again, and anyway take a look at this presskit for the game

the "interview with leading journalist" has this incredibly intricate cross-product vibe of not feeling like native English, feeling like it could be a fake interview, and attempting to be both serious and parody at the same time.

there ARE no teams at Sidebar Games! Sidebar is supposed to be like, two or three people in Australia, probably named Andrew, possibly the ghosts of another gaming company. it makes no sense to talk about "the main team", especially when asked if "the same people" are working on the game.

nothing about this interview makes sense if you know anything about golf story, video game development, the nintendo switch, or how interviews work. it's a completely unasked for fever dream that I am now trapped in, shouting "IT'S NOT CALLED MARIO SOCCER" (it would be Mario Strikers, and do Australians even call it soccer).

the credits for golf story and sports story are the same. the game is credited to Sidebar Games, with individual artists and musicians being credited by name (sports story does not deign to get a font-appropriate ê for one of their artists). but these games are so different that I can't believe this is the same team.

and now, you must leave. escape my dimension before you too start wondering where sports story even takes place if they don't do the golf story thing where the island zooms out and it's the shape of australia